Ask Lemmy

If all jobs were lost if rich people disappeared, then jobs aren't really necessary.

If jobs are necessary self-evidently, they do not require rich people to exist or get done.

I disagree. Cooperatives exist, in Germany many Banks and many companies renting out flats are cooperatives.

Thats simply untrue

We would just have a lot of smaller businesses all over. Instead of a few gigantic ones.

No more mcdonalds. Instead we would have multiple “bobs burgers” style places

Ask them how their experience is with companies taken over by venture capitalists.

Take Walgreens for example. Their new VC "rich people" owners, Sycamore Partners have closed 500 stores and cut 9000 jobs since taking over. They've cut so many jobs that the remaining employees no longer even try to answer the phones. The shelves are bare and the prices even higher than they used to be.

"Trickle down" means being pissed on.

I’d agree to a point but I’d point out they’re doing a piss poor job of it. The ruling class is at its best in decades and we have unemployment? Fucking why? Compel them to answer that and then you can begin hammering out the finer points. So basically if the rich provide for the poor by slowing the poor to work and provide for their families, then why the fuck is employment and home ownership down so much?

You ask them that.

Rich people are needed in our current system to provide money for literally everything because rich people, as a group, control and hoard all of the money.

If they didn't hoard all of the money, they a) wouldn't be rich and b) wouldn't be needed to provide jobs because there'd be more money in circulation.

Money doesn't come from rich people. They are not money trees. Money comes from the government and rich people hoard it so that the only way you and I can get money is to work for them.

The reason the money matters at all is because people need food, water, shelter, clothing, medicine, and community to live, but all of those things currently require money. Hoarding the money is equivalent to hoarding the necessities of life. We are destroying oversupply of food while people go hungry. We have vacancies everywhere while people go homeless. The whole system is organized by rich people against everyone else to prevent everyone else from having life's necessities so that they are all compelled to work jobs for the money that the rich people hoarded explicitly so that you would starve if you don't work for them.

Rich people aren't necessary in all societies, just the ones organized like ours.

I've done more jobs for working-class people than for rich ones.

Why are poor people poor if have job? Does the job need to be done? Then pay me the money. I do not agree, if a job needs doing, there is a market for it. Rich people create very little, they pool creativity together, by paying them money. If the creative people did not need money to survive, they could create on their own, void of "funders" which is all rich people are.

That sounds a lot like saying that the obese are needed to provide food for the thin.

Billionaires are job destroyers.

A job is a way of describing an organized, low-entropy state within an economic system. Its existence is in a constant state of opposition with the universe's natural tendency toward disorder.

A job comes into existence only when we provide sufficient demand such that the there is a supply of near continuous energy to sustain a heightened state. When that demand dissipates, the energy input falls below the threshold near for the job to exist.

Billionaires extract energy from every stage of this process. By skimming value without contributing. They increase the energy required to for our demand to create and maintain a job. This added pressure raises the system’s effective activation energy, reducing the number of jobs the system can support.

In this TED I will discuss how eating the rich is a value add to a capitalistic enconomic system.

You don't.

"So, you hiring?"

You should read about the Paris Commune

https://anarchistfaq.org/translations/decree-councils.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

It’s not a direct argument. But very interesting.

Yes, people meed to litter constantly to provide jobs for people employed to collect it.

Most emplpyment is provoded by small business, they are not billionaires but their business can be destroyed by them.

What are jobs? Are we talking about work that needs to be done, or are we requiring people to keep busy doing nothing to earn the right to stay alive?

Government can provide the same service for a lower cost and a greater benefit to society.

Define rich.

A certain amount of wealth concentration is necessary to organize the production and distribution of goods efficiently and invest in research and development, but it's the competition that drives people to strive for efficiency. Too much wealth concentration produces the opposite result where one person is able to make irrational and inefficient decisions, which negatively impacts everyone below them. See: Elon Musk. If was less wealthy, to the point where he couldn't afford to fuck up, then he wouldn't be able to screw over the people beneath him.

Like yes, money is needed to pay people money. That assumes we want to keep the system more or less exactly the same.

I disagree.

If we are talking about starting companies, poor people start companies all the time. You don't need to be rich to start a company.

As for having access to capital to create our expand a business, that doesn't need to come from a rich person or a collection of rich people. For instance, a lot of investment comes from pension funds, which are made up of the savings of many people.

You don't need capital to hire people, you need demand. The job creator thing is a myth if you're feeling charitable, or propaganda if you aren't.

I like the Ben Elton line: "He only had one dick & one stomach".
There comes a point where having more inevitably means hoarding more.

Educate yourselves on worker cooperatives.

An economy is strong not because there are many dollars of value in it, it is strong because many dollars of value move within it. The movement is the key thing people miss. The fact that there is $100 worth of food in a system means nothing if it never moves from the grocery store to a home, to a hungry person. The rich don’t get rich by moving value, they get rich by hoarding it, weakening the economy. A rich person buying all the food and only giving crumbs to the few workers they need would break the system. When food or fuel were scarce during recent history did we allow single rich families to buy it all? In order to keep the system functioning it was rationed. Why is capital any different?

Sure, rich people own the companies that employ the poor, but many of those same companies are investing heavily into AI and other automation so they no longer have to.

Ask if by rich people they mean funding?

If no: ask them to discuss functions uniquely fulfilled by rich people in the allocation of funding. They will likely need time to reflect, so plan to resume later, but the best answer is expediency/dispatch via unitary agency, and it’s easy to demonstrate why this advantage (A) is outweighed by numerous liabilities via human fallibility and (B) isn’t actually unique.

If yes: they have already conceded, but you might then shift to the question: must there be people who are poor?

That is a meatier conversation, since it challenges their assumption that people require imminent threat of destitution to motivate productivity. You can brute force this argument via strong scientific consensus, but for most you need only rely on their belief in human dignity. Just be aware that the most difficult branches of this conversational pathway are exceptions they might have carved out: groups for whom they hesitate to ascribe human dignity. But the revelation of such bigotry is important for their own personal reflection.

GL

Ask them how many sets of kitchen cabinets a rich person needs compared to a pore person. Then ask them what makes more work, one person buying 1 set of fancy cabinets or a 100 people buying an average set of kitchen cabinets.